“V.” at L: Pynchon’s First Novel Turns Fifty

Penguin recently announced that Thomas Pynchon will publish his next novel, “Bleeding Edge,” this fall. Set in Manhattan’s “Silicon Alley,” it will mark Pynchon’s literary return to New York City, where he has not ventured since his début, “V.,” published fifty years ago this month. In the intervening years, Pynchon has journeyed far and wide: Southern California (“The Crying of Lot 49” and “Inherent Vice”), Northern California (“Vineland”), Chicago (“Against the Day”), the American colonies (“Mason & Dixon”), and pretty much all of Europe, Harvard Square, Namibia, and Siberia (“Gravity’s Rainbow”).

The world, too, has changed a little since Benny Profane chased alligators through the sewers of Manhattan. Medgar Evers was killed three months after the publication of “V.,” and J.F.K. five months after that. Then R.F.K. and M.L.K. There was the rise of acid and pot, the riots of Newark and Detroit.

Despite all of the places he’s travelled, despite the near-infinite reach of his fiction, there is nevertheless a tendency, I find, to think of the media-averse Pynchon as hermetically sealed in a vat of his own ideas, puns, and fears. His famous paranoia has to it a pervasive, timeless quality, equally suspicious of all creeds and systems, of individuals and corporations alike.

But to read “V.” today is to experience Pynchon anew. Blast through the multilayered densities of “Gravity’s Rainbow,” “Mason & Dixon,” and “Against the Day,” and you have a young Cornell graduate, an engineer from Long Island, writing with an earnestness you might not have expected, about a world he could never recover. And though we think of Pynchon as the progenitor of postmodern irony, the novel’s central theme, as uttered by the jazz saxophonist McClintic Sphere, is one of sly but unmistakable sincerity: “Keep cool but care.”

I should confess that I have no idea what “V.” is about—and I have read it twice. It may be about Benny Profane, a hopeless schlemiel who, having been discharged from the Navy, bounces around New York City with a comically harmless gang called the Whole Sick Crew, spending a good amount of time in the aforementioned crocodilian pursuit. Or the novel could be about Herbert Stencil, the son of a prominent British consular official, Sidney Stencil, who had “died under unknown circumstances in 1919 while investigating the June Disturbances in Malta.” Stencil’s entire existence is focused on the hunt for V., a classic novelistic quest-without-resolution (in fact, V. might be fiction’s greatest example of a MacGuffin). V. may be a person, or may be a place, though it could also be neither: Pynchon calls it, at one point, “a remarkably scattered concept” and, at another, “the ultimate Plot Which Has No Name.”

And that’s fine. The ride is a bumpy one, the roads sometimes parallel, sometimes divergent, sometimes overgrown with weeds. My favorite passage, for example, involves Father Linus Fairing, a priest who ministers to rodents in New York’s penumbrous underground, his parish “a little enclave of light in a howling Dark Age of ignorance and barbarity.” I could endeavor to explain what his story has to do with either Profane’s picaresque adventures or Stencil’s search for V. But I am not sure it would make much of a difference. Pynchon novels, like certain dishes, tend to only suffer from excessive explanation. I advocate surrender to Pynchon; letting your mind toss on the wild currents of his language is a lot more enjoyable than treating his novels like puzzles, wondering where the pieces fit: Who is Rachel Owlglass? Why are we in Egypt? Just enjoy the bumps—or try to.

As is typical, we know very little about Pynchon’s forthcoming novel, with Penguin letting slip so far only that it will take place in “the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11.” This is a curious detail, because “V.” is also set in precisely such a lull. The main action of the novel takes place in 1956, the year that the fictional Profane left the Navy and the year before the real Pynchon did so himself, in order to return to school in Ithaca. Later novels would be set at points of acute historical distress, the books themselves getting longer, the plots and themes ever more Wagnerian. By contrast, the relatively smooth plateau of postwar America allows Profane (and, I imagine, Pynchon) to harmlessly meander like a “human yo-yo.”

The yo-yo, in fact, is a central image in “V.,” at least as much as the letter from which the novel derives its name. The defense firm Yoyodyne, Inc., central to the plot of “The Crying of Lot 49,” makes its first appearance in “V.,” and the yo-yo itself is referenced more than two dozen times, both as a symbol of Profane’s character and as a more pervasive “state of mind,” as one chapter heading has it. If for Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake,” for Pynchon it is a toy of the powerful, bounced this way and that, in a way that negates continuity. This means, as the philosophically inclined dentist Dudley Eigenvalue surmises, that “We are accordingly lost to any sense of continuous tradition.”

Profane’s very name suggests a world of utter trivialities, of rats who are closer to God than men, a world in which the sacred has no fixed value. You could argue that Stencil is Profane’s foil, that while the latter yo-yos through life, the former replicates, in his search for V., the quest of all who hunger for holy truth. But that would be too easy a solution for Pynchon, who calls V. nothing more than “a symptom,” of the sort “that are always alive, somewhere in the world.” That makes Stencil a classic desperado of American fiction, on the order of Gatsby and Ahab, all three uneasy in the world, all three unable to do a thing about it.

But there are nonetheless pleasures to be had in “V.” To read it is to remember that the man who was a student of Nabokov’s at Cornell could write a beautiful sentence. More than in the novels that would follow, the Pynchon of “V.” stops on occasion to let the reader appreciate the scenery.

Here is the desert in Egypt: “Soon, nothing. Soon only the desert. The two goats must choke on sand, nuzzling down to find the white clover.”

The city, broiled: “It was moving into deep summer time in Nueva York, the worst time of the year. Time for rumbles in the park and a lot of kids getting killed; time for tempers to get frayed, marriages to break up, all homicidal and chaotic impulses, frozen inside for the winter, to thaw now and come to the surface, and glitter out the pores of your face.”

In his review of “V.” for the Times, George Plimpton praised Pynchon’s freshman effort while also noting that “one suspects that he could churn out a passable almanac in a fortnight’s time.” If this was a compliment, then it was a backhanded one: Pynchon’s least successful novels have precisely this encyclopedic feel. But “V.” has to it that elusive youthful quality of wonder: Pynchon the explorer, not yet the classifier.

As it happened, I read “V.” for the first time in the summer of 2001, pretty much right at the end of the Clintonian détente of historical forces that will purportedly be the subject of “Bleeding Edge.” I was in college, in a phase of obsession with postmodernist fiction. Turning to “V.” directly after “Gravity’s Rainbow,” it felt lesser, less ambitious. Today, no longer living in the luxury of a lull, I can’t help but think that the earlier effort was one of a writer at once more adventurous and more grounded, of a writer enthralled by the vistas of both history and language, not yet limited by either. I don’t know if “V.” is his finest novel, but I am fairly confident that it is his most earnest one.

Alexander Nazaryan is on the editorial board of the New York Daily News, where he edits the Page Views book blog. He is at work on a novel about Brooklyn.